Opinion

CARL M. CANNON: Don't downplay the Donald

Many observers of U.S. politics believe that American voters search for traits in the next president they find lacking in the current model. If that’s true, we haven’t yet figured how to handle the problem of presidents’ runaway egos.

Partly it’s a function of modern campaigning: successful candidates speak every week for nearly two years – sometimes several times a day – with stump addresses consisting of two main elements: (a) how great they are; (b) how terrible their opponents are.

If a friend acted like this, you would conduct an intervention.

But we applaud such behavior in our politicians. By the time they move into the White House, it’s not a pretty picture.

Bill Clinton’s sense of self-worth was so elevated that he testified under oath that when an unpaid intern serviced him in the Oval Office, she was having sex but he wasn’t. George W. Bush – in a convention speech, no less – imitated his own simian-like strut on stage while quipping that in Texas this was called “walking.” Barack Obama is so enamored of his own image that he takes selfies at funerals and retroactively inserts himself into White House website bios of previous presidents.

Yet when it comes to sheer ego, the latest entry into the 2016 presidential field makes our last three chief executives look like camera-shy Buddhist monks who’ve taken vows of silence. Donald J. Trump, in his Tuesday presidential announcement and subsequent interviews, embarked on an orgy of preening, boasting and narcissism nearly impossible to parody.

Riding the escalator from his penthouse office in – where else? – the Trump Tower, The Donald hired actors to inflate the crowd and threw away his prepared text, winging it in a stream-of-consciousness speech in which he portrayed himself as a national savior who could outperform all previous U.S. presidents.

“Sadly, the American dream is dead,” he proclaimed. “But if I become president I will bring it back – bigger and better and stronger than ever before.”

He talked this way for 45 minutes, seamlessly, if not coherently, in a message that can be paraphrased thusly: I’m richer than the other people running for president, and therefore smarter, and can use my superior intellect to solve all the world’s problems.

A worldview that simplistic can make one sound like a simpleton, and Trump obliged, inserted himself, Forrest Gump-like, into the historical narrative of geopolitics. “Islamic terrorism is eating large portions of the Mideast,” he said. “They’ve become rich. I’m in competition with them.”

“Free trade is terrible,” he added. “Free trade can be wonderful if you have smart people. But we have stupid people.” At times, you wished for his own sake that Trump had an internal fact-checker, perhaps hidden in that famous hair, who could stop him from saying things like “When did we beat Japan at anything?” or “There are no jobs.”

When not bashing Japan and China, he bashed Mexico. Sometimes he did it with one swipe. “Mexico is the new China,” he said. Riffing on the Great Wall of China, he added: “I would build a great wall. And nobody builds walls better than me, believe me. And I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border and I’ll have Mexico pay for that wall.”

Trump also expressed personal animus for Mexican immigrants.

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” Trump said. “They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.”

It could have been funny except for the 19th century-style nativism – racism is rarely humorous – but it had an eerie quality to it, as if you were watching a little boy in a man’s body just blurt out any random thought that came into his head. Or watching a dark Hollywood version of “Batman” and this was a guy running for mayor of Gotham. Speaking in an exaggerated New York patois, he called the other presidential candidates “stupid” and “losers,” while boasting, like a 4-year-old, “I am very rich.”

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